How To Decide Between Landscape or Portrait Mode

In this short video, I’m going to show how to decide whether to use landscape mode or portrait mode when shooting videos with your smartphone.

Video Transcription

Hey Scott Clevely here with another tip on producing marketing videos with your smartphone, and in today’s video we’re going to talk about whether you should be shooting your videos in landscape mode, like I’m doing today, or in portrait mode, or vertical mode, and it’s really important that you choose the proper orientation so your videos have maximum impact, or you get maximum results from your video.

So I’ve done a lot of research lately on the differences between the two formats and which one’s work and which ones don’t work, and I’ve narrowed it down to two factors that you need to consider when deciding which orientation to shoot in. One is subject and the others is platform.

Now when I say subject, what are you actually shooting. If you’re shooting a person or talking head, like I’m doing right now, either format works well. But if you’re shooting say the Eiffel Tower? You want to shoot in portrait mode or vertical mode. If you’re shooting a landscape, like a sunset or mountain range, obviously you want to shoot in landscape mode. So, consider the subject that you’re shooting when deciding which orientation to use.

So, the other factor to consider, number two, is the platform, or the medium. Where are people consuming your video. For instance if people are watching a video in a movie theater, or a television set, or on a computer monitor, obviously landscape mode makes the most sense, so you don’t get the black bars on either side. But this is what I had missed is that if people are primarily consuming your videos on Facebook, or on a mobile device, people are holding the device in portrait mode and they’re scrolling through their news feeds and they come across your video. If your videos in portrait mode you’ve got their full attention because you fill up most of the screen so you need to consider where people are consuming your videos to decide which format you should shoot in.

Now I’m going to stick with landscape because my videos are consumed equally on desktop and mobile and I’ve also spread it out across multiple platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, so I’m sticking with landscape mode for my videos.